Do I look like a guy with a plan?
Comic book movies are all grow’d up and, boy, are they gloomy. Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to his brilliant Batman Begins goes beyond its predecessor and gives us a rich, multi-layered story with one of the more original takes on the comic book villain I can remember. With the creative success of this movie, we can officially write off the Tim Burton Batmans as an unfortunate detour (and the Joel Schumacher films as a large pothole in that detour).
We don’t sell Tic Tacs, we sell cigarettes. And they’re cool, available, and addictive. The job is almost done for us.
This movie wants to be the Dr. Strangelove of the tobacco wars and I’ll be darned if doesn’t almost do it. Some might say that cigarettes are an even more audacious subject for a comedy than nuclear war, since tobacco takes out more people in a given year then the A-bomb has in the history of the human race. Thank You For Smoking certainly aims for big targets, but they are also easy targets. The film’s position, namely that tobacco companies have behaved with the all the moral fiber of Jeffrey Dahmer’s ne’er-do-well brother, is hardly original nor particularly newsworthy. This acid-etched satire, directed by Ivan Reitman’s son, Jason, scores its points with sharply drawn characters.
